Thursday, June 26, 2008

Take Another Look Thursday: Dos

Our second Take Another Look Thursdayis brought to you by Hoagie, a DC homeboy if there ever was one. This guy just finished his first year of college, & is into Blogging Bigtime! Don't forget--you, too, can submit to The Scholastic Scribe's Take Another Look Thursday. Just e-mail your picks to scholastic_scribe@hotmail.com and we'll get 'em on the air! And, remember: You don't have to like something to give it a mini-review. We're an equal-opportunity site for complaints, as well.

In the meantime, sit back, relax, & read what Hoagie has to say about Life in the Fast Lane.

Village Chicken and the Burrito Joynt—Semi-sit down restaurants in Springfield, VA. Both are hole-in-the-wall places that only have one location (to my knowledge, at least). Both also serve delicious food. Village Chicken has pretty much anything you want: Steak and Cheese, Quesadillas (my two favorites), Gyros, Greek food, salads. The Burrito Joynt serves a similar array of Mexican, basically any kind you can imagine and is about seven million times better than Chipotle (and this is from a person who eats Chipotle about once every 10 days). The knocks on both places are generally the decor and location. Village Chicken is right by Subway on Rolling Road near West Springfield High School, so many people go the "healthy" route to Subway (and, as a Sandwich Artist, I wish they wouldn't). The Burrito Joynt is right on Franconia Road, near Lee High School, but at a point that it is semi-difficult to turn left back toward the Mixing Bowl during rush hour. But if you want tasty (and greasy) food at a reasonable price, head to Village Chicken or the Burrito Joynt. They may not be pretty (and your sandwich/burrito may be messy), but your taste buds will come out happy. I call both "semi-sit down restaurants" because I generally sit down there to scarf down my food. I imagine a lot of people do takeout at both, though.

StumbleUpon—Web browser plugin. Without StumbleUpon, I would probably get a few hours of sleep more every night and would have had a higher GPA last semester, but I'm okay with that. For those of us who just can't stop learning about different stuff, Stumble is perfect. After downloading the Firefox or Internet Explorer plugin, you get to choose an array of topics you're interested in. When you're done picking subjects, just click on the "Stumble!" button and it will take you to a random, user-submitted page that falls under one of your categories. You can give a page a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down" or neither, whether or not you stumbled there or not (for example, you can go to ESPN.com and give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down without Stumbling there). My last 5 stumbles have been: a live video feed of the Pyramids at Giza, an online game called "RoboKill," a striped-background generator, an article from MSNBC.com about people suffocating at a soccer game in Liberia and a list of 12 ways to get a date in 24 hours. With so many topics to choose from (501 total, from Acting to Windsurfing), it really is like channel-surfing on your computer. You'll never run out of things to do with StumbleUpon.

Nationals Park—DC. As probably the biggest homer in the entire world, the following might surprise you. Don't get me wrong—Nationals Park is a great place to catch a ballgame. I've been out four times total (three games and a tour), and therefore am qualified as an expert on the park. There is excellent food (Ben's Chili Bowl is the best, but they also feature Five Guys, Hard Times, Red, Hot & Blue, etc.) and great sightlines of Washington, DC, not to mention a playground and batting cages for the kiddos. My problem with Nationals Park is its lack of originality. Sure, the limestone backstop provides strange bounces if hit right and the gigantic HD scoreboard is as big as an apartment complex. But the "cookie cutter" aspect of the park makes it no different to me than Citizens' Bank Park in Philly. Besides the scoreboard and backstop, there isn't anything that will be identifiable when the game turns up on ESPN (or more likely, MASN). The new stadium is a lot nicer than RFK (so is your local Citgo's restroom), but it might be something you see once and then forget about until the Nats start getting results on the field. But definitely go at least once!

9 comments:

Wow! It's Thursday already? I can't wait for the weekend so I can Stumble until my heart's content. I love, love, love Stumble. I learn so many cool things! (Sometimes I do get stuck on a loop of lame stuff, too. That's not good.) It's a program that is made for surfing. Why did it take so long for someone to come up with this?